Assessment centres and development centres in an organization frame a basis for examining the skills, interests, and personality of a new and existing role in an organization. The tasks involved in these centres are interviews, group discussions, presentations, etc. The development centres through the light into the strengths and the areas of development of the employees.
Assessment and development centres:
An assessment centre is basically a compilation of a series of assessment that is been carried out using several techniques such as simulation, psychometric exercises, and tests so as to frame critical decisions in an organization. These critical decisions can be selecting or rejecting a new recruitment candidate, considering employees of appraisals and promotions, etc. In order to run an effective assessment centre, it is important for it to have clearly defined competencies, along with behavioural indicators and scales for evaluation. And the techniques that are used for assessment should assess the behaviours and competencies of the individual. Assessment centres make use of a number of techniques and multiple assessors to assess the candidates in different exercises.
The term assessment centres can be used interchangeably with an assessment centre as both are the techniques to evaluate the employees. But they both are different and there are some clear differences between them. The development centres make use of the same techniques used in assessment centres such as psychometrics, simulation exercises, etc., but both their purpose are totally different. Development centres are only for the developmental purposes of the employees and are conducted to assess their potential, their strength, and developmental needs. It results in a well documental developmental plan for each participant. These centres have tremendous acceptability among employees and are regarded as an objective and non-threatening assessment of the employee developmental areas.
Benefits of Assessment and developmental areas:
The importance of assessment and developmental centres in an organization can never be underestimated. It integrates into line managers with the workforce and helps in sharing information regarding the performance of their team member and their subordinates. It creates a partnership that is crucial for individual development in an organization. The other benefits of these centres are,Helps in identifying high employee potentials: Development centres helps in creating a pool of managerial talents and managers which is available across the different zones of an organization.
Identifying training needs: These centres help the candidate and the organization with concrete data on the improvement areas that can be used in the future for training the employees.
Hiring leaders and succession planning: The organizations can make use of these development centres to understand if an employee is capable of handling the challenges that come with their higher position.
Developing leaders: The assessment and development centres gauge the proficiency levels of various competencies in an organization and help it in identifying the key developmental areas for leadership goals.
Role of assessment and developmental centres in training the workforce:
The assessment and developmental centres in an organization helps in curating the right training program for the organization. They help in training employees on the following grounds,
Skill-based: Employees are identified and trained based on their unique skills sets that are mandatory to succeed in any job role and function.
Behaviour-based: The centres helps in identifying the behavioural gaps to be worked on. These are considered to be dominant success predictors for most of the job roles.
Proofing the future of the workforce: The centres augment the learning agility of the employees within the organization and identify their upcoming skills to develop the workforce.
Apart from curating the right training program for the organization, the assessment and development centres offer clear insight on why to train, whom to train and what to train. It identifies and develops key competencies in employees to help them achieve their business goals. It identifies the skill gaps for each employee based on their competency levels. They also help in designing a customized training plan based on individual skill gaps and training needs.
Role of assessment and developmental centres in leadership development:
These centres pave a scientifically validated approach to plan for the future of the organization. They define the key competencies that are required to succeed in critical roles. It makes use of valid and reliable tools to evaluate the candidate readiness on the key competencies. It makes use of customized reports to choose the right candidates wisely for succession. About all these centres develop a method to track the growth and development of the selected candidates.With the help of these attributes, organizations are able to develop leaders for their competent roles and align them towards achieving their business goals, in creating a better work environment and for future-proofing. Assessment centres and developmental centres are comprehensive psychometric programs are designed to evaluate the key competencies among individuals through a set of strategic group activities conducted in an offline setting.
Having a clear assessment and development centre in place helps the organization to understand the specific set of competencies that needs to be developed across the various job roles and verticals to achieve its desired training goal. It helps in creating a custom assessment for each of the job roles to access the proficiency of the candidate’s competencies. The centres also analyze the results of the assessment with the help of consolidated reports and analytics so as to design a highly functional training program for the employees.
Final words:
The importance of assessment and development centres in an organization is inevitable. They can take help from online portals that offer the best platform for assessment centres. Their tools help in a comprehensive evaluation of traits, behaviour, and cognition; it eliminates assessors’ biases with a number of tools. It enhances the productivity of employees and offers their objective assessments. Thus they offer an end to end management of all the hassles associated with organizational logistics as well. These tools can also be customized according to the needs of the organization and are at present been used by more than 2000 companies across the world.